Book review: As On a Darkling Plain

Scifi tosh of my least favourite genre, a self-conscious² attempt to be a proper book. By Ben Bova; see-also The Exiles Trilogy which I also didn't like. So why did I buy it? Mostly for the title, and the hope that it would be an interesting Icehenge knock-off. But it isn't.

Indeed to my surprise it predates Icehenge. This post tells me also that it is a fix-up, which neatly explains the pointless "Jupiter" part which takes up 2/5 of the book, and in which our author runs through yet more cod psychology, and fails to think of an alien animal more interesting than a whale or a shark, but like really really big.

Unlike Icehenge, which manages to imbue the monoliths with a sense of mystery, here the buildings on Titan are just big buildings that throb like a post office motorbike¹.

Going for two out of two on annoyingness³, the book also displays the irritating trope where the character sees something - in this case the buildings - and instantly and unshakeably adopts some prejudice - in this case that the aliens are hostile. And then even more irritatingly the characters have a stupid discussion in which the hero blatantly fails to advance any plausible arguments in favour of his prejudice, and no-one calls him a dimwitted tosser. Sorry, am I ranting?

Lastly, at the end of the book, it turns out that the mysterious throbbing motorbike - sorry, I mean buildings - are emitting gravity waves aimed at causing sunspots and solar flares, in a pathetically inefficient attempt to erase life on Earth. Why the aliens would choose such a hopelessly wigmawolishly woundabout way of killing us all instead of just tossing a couple of asteroids or even a few big nukes at us is never made clear.

Trivia: Sirius B went white dwarf 120 million years ago, so his timeline doesn't fit; but that may not have been known then, for all I know.

Notes

1. What's big and red and throbs between your legs?

2. If, per Lewis, the chief virtue of medaeival literature is its lack of strain, this type of book is the opposite.

3. I shall discretely ignore the dull love triangle stuff, but make it 3/3 if you like.